Klondaeg the Monster Hunter / Steve Thomas

Reviewed by: SingleEyePhotos

Genre: Fantasy

Approximate word count: 30,000 – 31,000 words

Availability   

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Author:

Steve Thomas is the author of four fantasy novellas. Klondaeg the Monster Hunter is a sequel of sorts to Smite Me, O Dark One!. He can be contacted at his website or through his Twitter account.

Description:

Monsters killed Klondaeg’s parents. Since he doesn’t know what kind of monsters they were, the simplest way to get revenge is to kill all monsters, guilty or not.

Appraisal:

I read, and enjoyed, the earlier story by this author, Smite Me, O Dark One! It struck me as a perfect combination of ‘dark and snark’, and I caught myself laughing out loud on occasion. I started on Klondaeg with high hopes that it would be in the same mold. Even though this story is set in the same world as the earlier one, what was funny in the first fell flat in the second. I was disappointed.

There were humorous moments, but they were more an aside than an integral part of the story. The novella is divided into five chapters or episodes. In each, Klondaeg sets out on a specific adventure. While the story as a whole is supposed to be a continuous thread, I found that there was very little to connect the various episodes except for the recurring characters. Each episode was its own self-contained little adventure, and seemed to have almost no relationship to the one before or the one after. The monster-killing, which was technically Klondaeg’s raison d’etre, was remarkably bloodless and pointless. His schizophrenic battle-axe was probably the highlight of the story. There were occasional mentions of things and events that sounded as though they should have been explained in an earlier episode, but weren’t, which left the reader wondering what context to put them in.

I feel that these stories would have been much better served if the author tightened up the storyline, gave more context for the goings-on, and linked the various episodes into a more cohesive whole. The world that the author has created definitely has possibilities and it seems a shame that this novella wasn’t able to live up to that potential.

Format/Typo Issues:

None. Formatting was very good and I did not notice any issues with typos.

Rating: ** Two stars